This must be great news for culturally sensitive rich white women, gay Hispanics, and graffiti "artists" from all over California. Everyone else knows that she would be a footnote in artistic history if it wasn't for her relationship with the Yankees All-Star closer Mariano Rivera.

Gotta ask, why is she more interesting than any other surrealist artist?

With most of the other ones, you have bits and pieces of their lives, but generally their whole lives are not treated as so important contextually. O'Keefe, Picasso, Warhol, Pollock. Their lives are important, but not more iconic then the art.

With her the cult of personality seems almost more important then the art.

Enemabag Jones:With most of the other ones, you have bits and pieces of their lives, but generally their whole lives are not treated as so important contextually. O'Keefe, Picasso, Warhol, Pollock. Their lives are important, but not more iconic then the art.

With her the cult of personality seems almost more important then the art.

You've just proven that you don't know much about the artists you mention. O'Keefe had the same sort of cult of personality going twenty-thirty years ago that Kahlo had a decade ago. You can't understand Picasso at all unless you know his life, as every painting is a coded autobiography (any half-decent Picasso expert can tell you who he was sleeping with when he painted any work just by looking at it). Warhol is huge at the moment and used as justification for everything anyone wants to do today (though people tend to ignore his personal life outside of the Factory, which is sad), and Pollock wouldn't be famous at all if he hadn't had a Hemingway-like mythos built around him both while he was alive and after he (fortunately for all concerned) took himself out of the picture right when he was starting to get fat, drunk and boring.

Dwight_Yeast:Enemabag Jones: With most of the other ones, you have bits and pieces of their lives, but generally their whole lives are not treated as so important contextually. O'Keefe, Picasso, Warhol, Pollock. Their lives are important, but not more iconic then the art.

With her the cult of personality seems almost more important then the art.

You've just proven that you don't know much about the artists you mention. O'Keefe had the same sort of cult of personality going twenty-thirty years ago that Kahlo had a decade ago. You can't understand Picasso at all unless you know his life, as every painting is a coded autobiography (any half-decent Picasso expert can tell you who he was sleeping with when he painted any work just by looking at it). Warhol is huge at the moment and used as justification for everything anyone wants to do today (though people tend to ignore his personal life outside of the Factory, which is sad), and Pollock wouldn't be famous at all if he hadn't had a Hemingway-like mythos built around him both while he was alive and after he (fortunately for all concerned) took himself out of the picture right when he was starting to get fat, drunk and boring.

Yeah, but they mostly had talent, so it was semi-justified. Unlike Kahlo.

Dwight_Yeast Enemabag Jones: With most of the other ones, you have bits and pieces of their lives, but generally their whole lives are not treated as so important contextually. O'Keefe, Picasso, Warhol, Pollock. Their lives are important, but not more iconic then the art.With her the cult of personality seems almost more important then the art.You've just proven that you don't know much about the artists you mention. O'Keefe had the same sort of cult of personality going twenty-thirty years ago that Kahlo had a decade ago. You can't understand Picasso at all unless you know his life, as every painting is a coded autobiography (any half-decent Picasso expert can tell you who he was sleeping with when he painted any work just by looking at it). Warhol is huge at the moment and used as justification for everything anyone wants to do today (though people tend to ignore his personal life outside of the Factory, which is sad), and Pollock wouldn't be famous at all if he hadn't had a Hemingway-like mythos built around him both while he was alive and after he (fortunately for all concerned) took himself out of the picture right when he was starting to get fat, drunk and boring.

You are right, I am no art major. When I imagine Picasso, I see the different point of view in one painting. I see vaginas with O'Keefe. I see soup cans with Warhol.

When I think of Kahlo all I think of are goofy self-portraits and some tragic lifetime storyline that is all about personality and not about the paintings themselves.

Ryker's Peninsula:This must be great news for culturally sensitive rich white women, gay Hispanics, and graffiti "artists" from all over California. Everyone else knows that she would be a footnote in artistic history if it wasn't for her relationship with the Yankees All-Star closer Mariano Rivera.

Allllllmost had me there. Nice craftsmanship, not something you see every day. Thanks!

Kahlo is a genuine artistic screwball. Most of the artists mentioned here were so far out of control that it wasn't funny and in fact in some cases resulted in their deaths. She however just kept chuggin' along.Kahlo took out of fashion and derided "peasant art" and elevated it to "Fine Art". No doubt her political leanings helped her "discover" and define the work she did. Which brings into play the dichotomy of her political philosophy versus the jewelry issue mentioned earlier.Tough woman. I've wondered why she chose to stay on the ride all the way to the end. I'd have given up and bailed far earlier. To get a better understanding of her and her work you need far more than a few images and a short video on the innertubes. You want to understand the political climate, her love life, and where she came from.Oh and, though not a fan of her work, it would be nice to see the exhibit.that's all I got.

Marcintosh:Kahlo took out of fashion and derided "peasant art" and elevated it to "Fine Art". No doubt her political leanings helped her "discover" and define the work she did.

To be fair, it was sort of the style of the times where she was; Diego and the rest of the Mexican muralists had decided that peasant art was the only "real" art (really ironic in Diego's case, as he trained in Paris in the 1920s and was a damn good Cubist) and all painted in that faux naive style, though she may have been an influence on them in that.

Enemabag Jones:/Or maybe as you are pointing to she may be overhyped recently.

She's definitely over-hyped now, as O'Keefe was in the 1980s and Pollock in the 1950s and 1960s; fashion comes and goes in the art world, but she'll always have importance for who she was and what she did. The fact that Trotsky was staying with them while on the run from Lenin's assassins means she has a place in history.

When I look at her work, especially the late self-portraits, what I see is pain. You need to see those braces and corsets, and understand that they were the state of the art in treating her at the time for a badly broken back which should have killed her, to understand the crazy imagery like her spine as a crumbling marble column. I've had some minor (ie, normal desk-bound white guy) back pain and I can't even imagine how she lived though the pain she did.

The other thing, and one of the major reasons she's gotten a lot of press now instead of when she was alive, is that she did what artists' wives who are also artists do: she put her work and career on the back burner and hyped her husband. For a long time, it was accepted that Diego Rivera was the better artist and she made the right move, but no one really looked at her work critically. So it lay pretty well unexplored and unappreciated until the late 80s and early 90s, when various Postmodern movements seized on it and saw in it what they wanted to.

The same basic thing happened with Jackson Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner's, work after her death: there was a great re-examination, a lot of writing about it, and the ultimate decision was that Krasner was a good, second-rate Abstract Expressionist and her work was put away.